Russia is working to develop within a few years the capability to threaten several neighbors at once on the scale of its present operation in Ukraine, a senior American general said.

Lieutenant-General Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, told Reuters an attack on another neighbour does not seem like an immediate threat because Moscow appears to have its hands full in Ukraine for now.

That’s right. Of course we’d need to mobilize which given the state of the economy, is not exactly a priority because I’m busy raising interest rates to prove just how much of a capitalist I am. This has nothing to do with the sanctions. You may think that we have only have about $300 billion in our foreign currency reserves in liquid assets including $80 billion in gold and the big state-owned companies (or majority state-owned companies) and private businesses in Russia owe about $700 billion in corporate debt coming due within the next three to five years. All of this is owed to western banks in dollar or euro-denominated amounts.

But I can always create more cash by flexing my pecs. How? Because I have seven pecs. Each with its own set of testicles. The sheer amount of testosterone I generate influences the foreign currency exchange.

The two threads of this discussion are tied.

Plans for this year include 700 new armored vehicles, 126 new military planes, 88 new helicopters and two brigades of Iskander-M air defense systems. Men, vehicles, river crossing gear, tanks, weapons, material, boots and the like all need to be paid for.Well, we in Russia certainly know how to do that: by directing all state resources to the military and letting the population freeze and go hungry.

We did it for 69 years one. Once more can’t hurt.

Of course, an alternate is to make the Rouble a reserve currency to the US Dollar, the Euro and the BPS. Last year I spent $76 billion USD and 5 billion Euros to keep the Rouble from going into the toilet. Why are my lovely roubles leaving when you could all buy my oil and fine Russian consumer goods in roubles?